Heartland Junk Part I: The End: A ZOMBIE Apocalypse Serial Read Free Page A

about voices in
his head while I backed slowly away. I had no idea what to do. I
looked at Jennie, hoping she could tell me something, but her eyes
were wide and teary and just as confused as my own. She'd pressed a
hand to her ear, and when she pulled it away now it made a
sick shhlurrp sound and
little slimy strings of blood trailed back to her head like
spiderwebs.
    Rivet had gone
quiet and was lying facedown on the floor. Every few seconds, he
inhaled with a shuddery rasp that shook his whole body, but besides
that he didn't move.
    That headache
thing, it was getting worse. I was trying to wrap my head around
Rivet, around the whole goddamned morning, but there was something
in my skull fighting back, trying to keep me from connecting the
dots. There was something important about all of this—even then I
felt the pattern—but there were claws in my brain pulling me away
from figuring it out.
    Rivet gave a
shuddering breath. Jennie had quieted to a whimper. Nobody had said
anything. It had been over a minute. It was like we were all
paralyzed.
    I shook my head and
bashed a palm into my forehead, trying to clear out the cobwebs.
Coffee, a cigarette, a hit. Something to get back to normal. But
then there was the matter of my best friend turned cannibal on my
living room floor, and it didn't feel like "normal" existed in the
same universe as me anymore. Still, something had to be done.
Jennie was still bleeding; she needed attention. I figured that was
the logical first step; then I might have a shadow of an idea about
what to do with Rivet.
    It might be a
testament to our lifestyle back then that I didn't even consider
calling the cops. When you become a junkie, you learn to deal with
your own problems.
    Heroin gives you a
perverted species of strength.
     
     

Chapter 3
     
    RIVET AND I had
been friends since the third grade. He'd been sitting in the back
of Mrs. Johnson's class, already something of an outcast in his
shabby hand-me-downs, when I walked in two weeks after the school
season started. I'd spent my whole life up to that point in Hong
Kong before heading back to the states, and I guess I was as
backward as could be in that sleepy Missouri suburb community just
outside of Jericho.
    Grade school is
tougher than most adults remember. I was only a few weeks late for
the ride, but friendships that would last the whole year had
already been sealed in cement, so it was just social chance that
Rivet and I had gravitated toward one another, both outcasts in our
own right.
    Back then,
Rivet was known as Ritchie Whales, which was either a cruel joke or
his God-given name. At about thirteen, we started calling him Rivet
because he'd gone and gotten his ear pierced – not ears in the plural, just the one ear, the left one –
and only a week later he lost the little stud earing he'd bought at
the parlor and took to sticking an aluminum welding rivet in the
hole so it wouldn't seal up on him. It was sort of a joke at first,
a temporary gag by a teenager who barely even knew what being a
teenager was yet. But over time, in that gradual, molasses-slow way
things have of gelling into place, it became his thing , a piece of Rivet that was always there, just
like his eyes and ears and nose.
    Now, ten years
older and a hell of a lot less than that wiser, Rivet's rivet
glinted a ricocheted ray from the bright light beyond my living
room window as he heaved another painful breath into his lungs.
    I stepped over an
old pizza box on the floor and came up beside the couch. Jennie
looked up at me mutely, a lost animal in pain. She'd apparently
been shocked into silence, which was a rare thing, but I doubted
anything like this had ever happened before. The blood had already
congealed a bit on her cheek, although it was still streaming
bright red from the fleshy lump that had once been an ear. Her
auburn hair lay matted against it, glued to her temples and dark
with the wetness.
    "Come on, Jen," I
said. "Can you stand?"
    A sound gurgled